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For Sale: Ordinary Objects Imbued With Whitey Bulger’s Notoriety
Rings, and Cat Pictures, Highlight Sale of Whitey Bulger’s Possessions
(1 day later)
BOSTON — At 4:30 a.m. on June 22, 2011, James (Whitey) Bulger marked his calendar. A fitness enthusiast who worked out with barbells, he jotted down his vital signs: His blood pressure measured 110 over 63, his pulse 57.
BOSTON — When James (Whitey) Bulger and his girlfriend, Catherine Greig, were on the lam in Santa Monica, Calif., they befriended a stray cat, Tiger, feeding it and taking it to the veterinarian. But Tiger did not repay the kindness, leading, unwittingly, to the duo’s arrest in 2011 after a former neighbor, who knew them as the cat’s protectors, recognized them from F.B.I. photos and turned them in.
It would be the last entry on his calendar. Later that day, law enforcement officers swooped down on his apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., and hauled Mr. Bulger, long one of the country’s most-wanted fugitives, into custody.
A framed picture of Tiger that hung on their wall was one of hundreds of items that were sold on Saturday at an auction of Mr. Bulger’s and Ms. Greig’s belongings. A friend of the Greig family bought it, along with several pictures of other cats, for $110, with the intention of giving them to Ms. Greig, 65, who is expected to finish serving 10 years in prison in 2020.
Five years later, after his conviction in federal court here on 11 murder charges, the detritus of Mr. Bulger’s life is going on the auction block. The idea is to raise money for some of his many victims.
Mr. Bulger, 86, who is serving a life sentence, was one of this country’s most vicious and notorious crime bosses, and at one time ranked just below Osama bin Laden on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He was convicted in 2013 of a sweeping array of gangland crimes, including 11 murders.
Almost all the contents of that Santa Monica apartment — which he shared with his girlfriend and fellow fugitive, Catherine Greig — are piled on tables and are on display at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, a stone’s throw from Mr. Bulger’s old stomping grounds in South Boston, which he ruled and terrorized in the 1970s and ’80s.
But the auction of his and his girlfriend’s mostly mundane belongings had an odd way of minimizing the brutality of his decades-long reign of terror in his native South Boston. The proceeds — a modest $109,295 — will go to the families of his victims.
A preview for the public began Friday. The auction starts at 10 a.m. Saturday. Bidders from around the world can join in through an online simulcast. A catalog of the auction, being held by the United States Marshals Service and Gaston & Sheehan Auctioneers, is available at www.txauction.com.
And it brought out people who, while fully versed in the Bulger legend, seemed to look past the murders, the drug dealing and the corrupt relationship with the F.B.I. — and instead saw the harmless retired couple that Mr. Bulger and Ms. Greig pretended to be for 16 years.
It is not known whether Mr. Bulger, 86, will be watching from the federal penitentiary in Florida that he is likely to call home for the rest of his life. Ms. Greig, 65, is serving 10 years in prison.
Take John Kelley, 54, who owns a limousine company and lives in Andover, Mass. He paid $4,300 for a boxing dummy wearing a safari hat that Mr. Bulger kept in his window and $5,200 for Mr. Bulger’s “psycho killer” skull ring.
Nor is it clear how much money the more than 100 bins of items could bring in. The proceeds, plus $822,000 in cash found stuffed in the apartment walls, are to be divided among the families and estates of 20 people whom Mr. Bulger and his cronies murdered and three whom they extorted through their sprawling criminal enterprise over the decades.
“These people got hurt, and the money will help them out,” he said of the families.
Some of the items, like an outsize gold and diamond Claddagh ring, for which bidding starts at $11,370, could bring in thousands of dollars. Others, like that calendar, are basically worthless but offer a glimpse into Mr. Bulger’s 16 years on the lam. The calendar is largely blank, devoid of social engagements or to-do lists, reflecting the small, narrow world to which he had retreated.
Asked what he thought of Mr. Bulger, Mr. Kelley shrugged. “He is what he is,” he said. “I don’t have opinions. Back in the day, those people, the syndicators, that’s what they did. I’m not saying it’s good or bad. That’s what they did. It was their craft.”
Dozens of items, seemingly more suited to a low-end yard sale than an international auction, speak to the mundaneness of that everyday life — Christmas decorations, kitchen utensils, a beat-up chest of drawers, a night stand that has lost its veneer, 27 pairs of used women’s sunglasses, multiple pairs of white sneakers, size 9 ½, and a batch of T-shirts and Old Navy hoodies.
Colm Dunphy, 52, a South Boston real estate developer — whose $23,000 bid won him Mr. Bulger’s claddagh ring, the most expensive item at the auction — had nothing bad to say about Mr. Bulger.
But ordinary as they are, the items are here for sale because of their provenance.
“I thought he was a good guy,” said Mr. Dunphy, who still has the lilt of his native Northern Ireland. “I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with me, but he helped a lot of people.”
“There are certain things that obviously in and of themselves are not very valuable, but they take on a whole different value because of who they belonged to, who used them, whose home they were in,” said Carmen Ortiz, the United States Attorney in Boston whose office prosecuted Mr. Bulger. She spoke as she walked through the auction hall on Friday.
Kathy Driscoll, 70, who grew up in the same housing project with Mr. Bulger, said she had a hard time squaring the meager remains of the gangster’s life with his outsized reputation, and could hardly comprehend that someone with so much money and power had lived such a crimped, little life.
The goal, she said, was to raise as much money for the victims as possible. She said she had already come to terms with what a reporter called “the ick factor” of profiting from the personal belongings of a ruthless criminal. While distasteful, she said, the auction is unlikely to make Mr. Bulger any more notorious than he already is.
“It’s so modest,” she said. “When I got here and saw this, I felt worse than just thinking it was picking over someone’s bones.”
“As much as we don’t want to bring greater notoriety, there’s already been so much notoriety toward this individual, in terms of books and movies and writings, it’s hard to say how much more this is really bringing to it,” she said of the auction.
She and her daughter, Katy Kroll, 41, spent $55 for two rolling shopping carts that Mr. Bulger and Ms. Greig used to carry their groceries. She reminisced fondly about her days in the Old Harbor project in Boston, where Mr. Bulger was 16 years her senior.
The sale does not include really personal items like Mr. Bulger’s underwear, socks, soap or boxes of tissues and toilet paper (a frugal man, he bought such items in bulk; they have been donated to the needy).
“He was the pied piper,” she said. “He’d throw silver dollars at the kids. You’d go by him in the street and he’d throw money.”
It also does not include the 30 weapons that Mr. Bulger had stuffed inside his apartment walls; Ms. Ortiz said the law prohibited the government from selling guns that could end up back on the street, though they might go on display at a law enforcement museum.
The proceeds of the auction, along with $822,000 in cash that Mr. Bulger had stuffed into his apartment walls, will be divided among the families and estates of 20 victims whose murders were tied to Mr. Bulger and his associates, and three whom they extorted in their criminal enterprise.
Nor does the auction offer up the manuscript Mr. Bulger had been writing; Ms. Ortiz said its many references to violent acts made it inappropriate for sale.
“We can’t bring back the victims,” said Thomas J. Abernathy III, assistant chief inspector of the asset forfeiture division of the United States Marshals Service, which held the auction. “This is better than destroying the property, and it’s some compensation for the victims.”
“There are people who may glamorize him and make him bigger than life, and they’re going to exist whether we do this auction or not,” Ms. Ortiz said. “At the end of the day, I think the whole purpose of it is to make this for the victims, and when I focus on that piece of it, it justifies it.”
Steve Davis, who maintains that Mr. Bulger strangled his sister although the jury in the 2013 trial reached no conclusion on that charge, agreed. Mr. Davis even bid on some items as a strategy to raise the final prices.
Here are five picks among the items that drew our attention. Who will wind up with these Bulger keepsakes?
“All the damage has been done,” he said. “All the families can do now is get financial help.”
• A replica of the Canadiens’ 1986 Stanley Cup championship ring set with 23 round diamonds, engraved inside with “Thanks Jim, Love Chris & Karen.” The origin of the ring is unclear; it would seem to be a gift from Chris Nilen, a Canadiens player, who was the son-in-law of Teresa Stanley, another of Mr. Bulger’s paramours. But Mr. Nilen has said that he did not give Mr. Bulger the ring. In any case, it was dear to Mr. Bulger. After he was captured in 2011, he agreed to give up virtually all of his possessions, but he fought to keep this; ultimately, he had to forfeit it.
At one point, as he milled around the auction, held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, Mr. Davis met Mr. Kelley, the bidder who had won the dummy and the ring.
• Mr. Bulger immersed himself in books about war, spies, military battles and the Holocaust, and wrote copious notes in their margins. On a heavily underlined page of “Into That Darkness” by Gitta Sereny, about the commandant of Treblinka, he scribbled: “I don’t agree. These Nazis enjoyed their work. The power of life and death over helpless victims. Fringe benefits of currency, gold and sex.”
The two men hugged.
• A sterling silver “Psycho Killer Skull” ring made by Crazy Pig Designs in England. According to The Boston Globe, Mr. Bulger put the ring, $50,000 cash and personal documents in a London safe deposit box two months before he became a fugitive in 1994. The F.B.I. and investigators from Scotland Yard discovered the deposit box in 2002, The Globe said, though it would be another nine years before they were in possession of Mr. Bulger.
“I saw he almost had tears in his eyes, he felt so bad for us,” Mr. Davis said. “He said he didn’t want to feel like he was insulting us. It’s like he was making a donation to a cause he believes in.”
• A boxing torso with a wide-brimmed safari hat. Mr. Bulger put this dummy near his window in Santa Monica to give the impression of someone on watch.
There was little sentimentality in the buyer of one of the auction’s few amusing offerings — a ceramic cup in the shape of a rat, a creature for which Mr. Bulger, despite being an F.B.I. informer, has expressed infinite disdain.
• A ceramic cup inside a ceramic rat. If there was anything Mr. Bulger loathed, it was a rat: a snitch who could disrupt his criminal operation. And yet, his secret role with corrupt F.B.I. agents was exactly that. This rat cup, which Mr. Bulger used as a pencil holder, is likely to be one of the hottest items at the auction. Its starting price, $20, had already risen to more than $2,500 before the auction opened.
The buyer, a 47-year-old trucker who did not want to give his name, said he bought the rat because he found it ironic. He paid $3,600.
Asked what he thought of Mr. Bulger, he minced no words.
